A typical data center may contain Information Technology (IT) equipments including servers, telecommunication equipments, networking equipments, switches and the like. The IT equipments may be arranged on racks or frames in the data center. The IT equipments may generate heat as a result of being utilized for processing of various actions and tasks. The heat generated by the IT components may therefore need to be compensated in order to avoid heating or generating a hot-spot in the data center. The IT equipments may be cooled using cooling units such as computer room air conditioners (CRAC) or computer room air handlers (CRAH), wherein each of these cooling units may be deployed in the data center. The CRAC may be at least one of a return-air controlled CRAC, supply controlled CRAC and the like. Further, the cooling of the IT equipments may also be achieved using advanced cooling units such as in-row coolers, rear door coolers, liquid cooled cabinets and chip cooling techniques.
Data centers consume huge amount of energy in operation. Hence, data center owner strives to reduce energy bills. Cooling units constitute to a major portion of this energy. The cooling of the data center by the computer room air conditioners (CRAC) or the computer room air handlers (CRAH) may depend on various factors associated with design and operational parameters of the data center. Inefficient design or operational condition associated with cooling can lead to the occurrences of hot spot at few localized locations or hotter regions inside the data center. In order to mitigate hot spots and hotter regions, the data center administrator may control air supply of the cooling units for cooling of the racks and the servers belonging to the region affected. However, due to the non-intuitiveness and complex nature of the flow involved in the cooling, the cooling units employed this way without clear understanding of the flow phenomenon, may not be adapted efficiently in order to cool the data center. Therefore, the data center may either be over-cooled on under-cooled and hence the cooling efficiency of the data center may be affected. Therefore, the current data center centers may face a problem of optimum cooling and thereby leading to high cooling costs and wastage of energy resources.
One of the methods of optimizing the cooling efficiency includes performing analysis of the current cooling efficiency of the data centers. In order to perform the analysis, temperature data, air flow data, topographical data and inventory data associated with the equipments in the data center is to be analyzed. However, since there may include numerous equipments located in the data center, it is a challenge to identify appropriate equipments corresponding to which data required for the analysis needs to be captured. As a result, data center management systems may capture data from large number of equipments of which the data corresponding to only few types of equipments may be relevant for the analysis. The capturing of redundant data may therefore unnecessary result in storage and computation overheads of the data center management systems performing the analysis of the data center.